September 1st, 2020
Massive, long form single player RPGs aren’t the most common thing any more, at least when it comes to western games. In the days where everything is trying to be a live service or a “play your way” adventure game there’s a significant lack of games along the lines of Witcher, Dragon Age, and even Skyrim. Fingers crossed for Cyberpunk 2077, but until then there’s a remaster of 2012’s Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning coming out (creatively named “Re-Reckoning“) so I decided to give the original version a shot…and stopped ten hours later, which is why this is an “impressions” piece instead of a full review.
Frankly the only thing Kingdoms of Amalur does right is the concept of its plot, so we’ll get that out of the way first and then beat the game to death for the rest of the review. So often video games feel like you’re the only competent person surrounded by a circle of ineffectual clowns that need you to save the day, and someone writing for this game clearly thought that was interesting enough to make a whole game out of that conceit. At the start of Amalur your player-generated character is resurrected by the mortal races’ attempts to create a process that will cheat death, and this apparently severs your connection to “Fate,” allowing you to choose your own destiny and the destiny of others instead of being bound to a predetermined path.
In-universe the concept of Fate is used mostly by groups of hyper-accurate fortune tellers called “Fateweavers,” individuals who can see how Fate guides the people of Amalur, up to and including their inevitable deaths. Naturally the first thing you do after the prologue is encounter one of these Fateweavers: an alcoholic that grew disillusioned after seeing his own meaningless death and mostly uses his powers to score free drinks by telling bar patrons the future. Just as naturally as meeting someone like this you prevent his foretold death by using your Fate powers, which present as a time-slowing super form where you “sever the strands of Fate” in cinematic finishing moves. Thus begins what I assume is meant to be an epic journey to discover what your powers mean for the natural order of the world, but as I said before I gave up playing after ten hours.
For those who don’t want to read the whole review, the short version is that Kingdoms of Amalur doesn’t feel very interested or connected to the world that it’s trying to portray or the story that it’s trying to tell, which leads to an overall less engaging experience that I found very similar to Mass Effect Andromeda…which is never a good sign. For a more in-depth look let’s start with how the idea of your character not being bound by Fate is implemented: the class system.
The big thing that Amalur (and positive articles about the game) pushes on you is that your class selection is “fluid.” They’re referred to as “Destinies” in the game, and at any point you can pop open the Destiny menu and pick a different Destiny to give you the sorts of bonuses you expect from a normal character class. It’s an appealing idea but is limited by how you unlock them: by investing points into three generic skill trees. The Destinies can only be unlocked by putting a certain number of points in each tree, so you will inevitably have one class that is always better than the others so there’s no reason to flip to weaker Destinies.
As an example of what I mean, let’s compare the combat Destinies to the hybrid combat/magic Destinies. The numbers used here aren’t completely accurate, but the ratios are what matters. The pure combat Destinies take a certain number of points in the combat tree to unlock, for example the third tier combat Destiny takes 48 skill points exclusively in the combat tree while the second tier combat destiny takes 20. Meanwhile the hybrid Destinies, such as the combat mage Destinies, take the same number of skill points as the pure Destinies, but instead they’re split between two skill trees. So the tier three combat mage Destiny takes 24 points in combat and 24 points in magic to get that Destiny unlocked. And sure, since you’ve invested 24 points in combat and magic you’ve also unlocked the tier two Destinies in combat and magic (they cost 20 points, if you’ll recall from a sentence ago) but why would you ever switch to them if the combat mage is better simply by definition because it’s a higher level? There’s an argument that it’s more “play how you want” and some times having a little heavier focus on melee or magic could be useful, but since you can use any weapon or magic spell regardless of your class there’s nothing stopping you from using a bow or a spell in those situations even if you’re a pure combat Destiny.
The hybrid nature of the combat has an interestingly modern feeling, but it’s more of a negative because everything feels so disconnected. Each weapon and spell is its own thing that doesn’t flow together, and while I’m not expecting flawless freeflow Devil May Cry combat from western RPGs they could have done something similar to Witcher 2 (which was even better in Witcher 3 but we’re doing time-appropriate comparisons right now) where spells and sword combat felt more naturally connected than like separate chapters of different books. This makes traveling and completing quests feel like even more of a chore than the quest designs already are, since there is no joy in Amalur’s combat despite a fair effort to be in-depth.
But I just touched on the biggest problem with Kingdoms of Amalur, the thing that made me stop playing and make painful comparisons to Mass Effect Andromeda: the quests. It’s the side quests in particular but everything in Amalur‘s quest system brings a lot of different comparisons to other RPGs in mind, and none of them are flattering. We’ll leave the Andromeda comparison for the end because it’s the most simplistic and start with our first comparison: quest design in Amalur vs quest design in Fallout New Vegas (Fallout 3 can come too, though I played even less of it than I did of Amalur). Both Amalur and New Vegas have a similar philosophy for their quest design on paper: you have a main objective that’s significantly far away and a million side quests between you and it. You’ll naturally want to visit the places with side quests, after all you’re playing an RPG and there’s experience points to be had, but herein lies the subtlety of good side quest design vs bad side quest design.
A bad side quest is one that doesn’t feel like you’re accomplishing anything or, in some cases, accomplishing too much. It shouldn’t detract from the main quest’s importance but it shouldn’t be so insignificant that it doesn’t expand on the world at all to the point where it just feels like a waste of time. And most of all, unless it’s the point of the side quest, it shouldn’t feel like a chore. I don’t remember much about New Vegas‘ quests, but most of the side quests that I do remember were very centralized and focused in their assigned area. Figure out who killed a guy’s wife. Help with a hostage situation. Gangsters roaming outside the city. We can do similar comparisons in games like Witcher 3, where you might pick up a side quest from a job board that sends you across the map but once you get there it’s generally focused on the city the quest-giver lives in. And all of these have relatively low stakes but can be interesting or engaging depending on the writing, whether it’s a mystery, a bump in the road on your way to something else, or something slightly more intricate.
Now let’s try to quickly go over three separate side quests in Amalur, though I’m sure to mention a few more before the review is over. Quest one: When you get to your first town you’ll find out that a Fae woman was attacked in the town square, and no one around is able to heal her so you’re sent (because why not send the guy who just got into town) to talk to another Fae in the woods about what you should do. So you walk in a big circle to get to the cliff overlooking the city where the second Fae is, and they give you the brilliant idea to give the injured person a HEALTH POTION. So you go to the alchemist to get a health potion, but she’s too distraught because her plans for a BIOLOGICAL WEAPON THAT COULD KILL THE WORLD have gone missing with her apprentice, who just might happen to be in an out of the way cave. So you get there and he is in the cave, but he’s spread containers of the biological weapon throughout the forest so you have to run through the entire area to several bandit camps to smash boxes (after killing him as well, of course) and after all that you’re able to give the hurt Fae a health potion. BUT WAIT! You have to go to where she’s from and explain what happened on behalf of the village, so you have to go to an entire new area of the game just to have a two second conversation where the Fae go “it’s cool, bro don’t worry about it” and then go all the way back to the starting village where your reward is a sword that is terrible in comparison to the dozens of swords you must have picked up while running around on this fool’s errand. So where did this quest mess up? It was needless busywork (needing to run around just to get the brilliant idea to use a health potion on someone), the stakes were too high for a starting quest, finishing it felt like a chore, and you just feel like you wasted your time because the rewards aren’t worth it and you barely feel like you accomplished anything because the Fae’s attacker is never discovered.
Quest two: you find a wolf that’s been turned into a man. It starts off promisingly enough, with the man referring to humanoids as “two legs” and complaining about clothes. Turns out you need to find a fountain some sprites are guarding, kill them and get some water from the fountain that will turn the wolf back. Straight forward enough and the sprites are nearby so let’s go questing. You kill the sprites, but the fountain disappears. Go back to the man, he says that the fountain must be “looking for something” and you eventually determine it’s some sort of plant. So you find some of that plant and then a quest indicator shows where the fountain is, but if you don’t get there fast enough the fountain disappears and goes somewhere else (the other side of the map, in fact) and if you don’t get there in time it’ll disappear AGAIN and you’ll have to chase this fountain around the area until you get a lucky spawn. Why? You have the thing it wants, why doesn’t it stick around for you or even come to you? Eventually you get the man his fountain juice and he turns back into a wolf after saying that he would tell his pack about your kindness, but it doesn’t do a damn thing about all the wild wolves that will try to kill you in that forest for the rest of the game. So a nice, smaller scale quest but it feels like you accomplished nothing, got even less for it, and it was more pointless running around.
Quest three/four: I completed two quest chains that eventually led to me not only owning property but also straight up killing Fae gods, complete with their own fittingly graphic take down scenes with my Fate severing powers. As cool as those scenes were let’s look at them from where I was in the main quest line: I met the drunk Fateweaver, went to go visit his friend that knew more about Fate than he does, found the friend dead, and was told by the drunk afterwards to meet him at some Fate temple. That was it. Not even one proper story mission into the game and I already killed two of the most dangerous Fae alive (at least as I was led to believe), which is absolutely ridiculous. Sure, there’s an argument to be made that it’s my fault for going so far into quest lines before getting a handle on the main quest, but other, better RPGs have found ways around that before and there was nothing stopping Amalur from employing things like quests locked behind story progression and such.
All of this reminds me of Mass Effect Andromeda‘s quest design because the only way that game was bearable was by ignoring the side quests. Otherwise it was “collect four of this from all four corners of the map” or “jump to three different star systems to follow a renegade shuttle” over and over again until you were so sick of the busywork that even the flying between planets animations couldn’t save you. At least Andromeda had the decency to not have a quest that’s just “go into a cave and get a book” like a particularly “thrilling” Amalur side quest had me do, but since I skipped 40% of Andromeda‘s quests maybe there was a “book in a cave” quest that I missed. Interestingly enough, Andromeda also had a class switching system…
I think another problem with the quests also comes from the bits that make up the world. Traveling is awful as there is no sort of mount so you either fast travel all over the map or have to run everywhere, and while you travel with NPCs they either don’t talk at all or say the same two lines over and over again. At least in Witcher when you had to go to who knows where with an NPC there was dialogue along the way, dialogue that gives character to the world and the player. Maybe this is a sacrifice that one has to make for a player-made character with no voice, but KOTOR, New Vegas, and even Skyrim managed to have travel companions be interesting even without a voiced main character so that’s not a good enough excuse.
The world is also a pain to travel through, beyond being one of the most claustrophobic “open world” RPGs I’ve played. Every twenty feet there will be a glowing plant that you’re encouraged to interact with, much like the flowers you can find in Witcher 3, but unlike Witcher 3 you actually need to invest in skills in Amalur to be able to properly pick flowers more than ten percent of the time (if that) so it makes every slight detour to a glowing object a battle of RNG frustration. Then there’s the chests you’ll find all over the world with their lock picking mini-games, perhaps the worst lock picking mini-game of all time. Lock picking in better games with lock picking skills (specifically thinking about Fallout here) has some level of nuance to it, where you slowly rotate the lockpick and then try to turn the lock, with a faint noise to indicate the pick is about to break. This gives you enough of a warning to stop turning the lock, reset, and try again a few times before the pick breaks, which makes all but the most difficult locks manageable even for players that don’t invest in the skill. Amalur‘s lockpicks on the other hand are basically made of tinfoil for all the durability they have, and the “mini-game” is essentially just pressing a button to watch a meter fill up and hope that you notice your pick quiver the half a second before it breaks with little fanfare and the lock resets. Completely unfulfilling, particularly when half the chests are full of crap anyway, but that could be said for most of the game.
Well it’s finally happened: I’ve found a RPG that I dislike more than Skyrim, at least in terms of how one creates an environment for an open world RPG. Vast landscapes, establishing a story before you’re ambushed by side quests, characters that are more than just exposition dumps, etc are all things that Skyrim does better than Kingdoms of Amalur, and Witcher 3 does EVERYTHING better than Kingdoms of Amalur. This is a frustrating, disconnected, boring, closed-in and uninspiring game that looks like a single player World of Warcraft but is somehow even less interesting. I have no idea why it’s getting a remaster but I’d recommend staying away from Kingdoms of Amalur in any form.
